Printer-friendly version

Send to a friend

You might also be interested in

• The Week in Music
• The Defibrillator
• battle of the hip-hop allstars
• Meryl's Treats
• Reviews

This Issue 11/15/2007

Also in this issue

• Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangster
• Take Four: Prepare for Battle
• Unofficial Soundtracks
• Street Beats
• COSLOWPOLITAN

Marvin Gaye

Trouble Man

1972

There was a time - before the days of Zach Braff and his sleepy iTunes playlists - when movie soundtracks were worth buying. In the early '70s, at the height of the blaxploitation movement, three such soundtracks reigned above all others: Curtis Mayfield's Superfly, Isaac Hayes' Shaft, and Marvin Gaye's regrettably forgotten Trouble Man.

Recorded in 1972, directly after his magnum opus What's Going On, Trouble Man is a haunting, semi-autobiographical, blues-infused sketch of an album. Gaye composed and produced all the tracks himself, departing even further from his saccharine Motown image to create an ethereal soundscape of melancholy impressions - the lyrics are sparse, the instrumentation is muted, and the subject matter is, well, trouble.

Despite its ostensible purpose as the backing track to a B-movie, Trouble Man works because it offers an intensely introspective snapshot into the doomed singer's world-weary, drug-addled mind at the height of his troubled career.